Director’s Welcome: What’s On at CRASSH, Easter Term 2019

“

The Easter term offers a rich array of intellectual inducements and provocations, in the form of lectures, workshops and conferences.

”

Professor Steven Connor, Director of CRASSH

The Easter term offers a rich array of intellectual inducements and provocations, in the form of lectures, workshops and conferences. In May alone, we have three distinguished visiting lectures, kicking off on Mayday itself with UCLA writer, book artist and theorist of visual text Johanna Drucker. As part of the Cambridge Digital Humanities Distinguished Lecturer Series, she will reflect on the tensions between humanities methods and the demands of formal systems, in her lecture entitled Looking Back and Thinking Ahead: Humanistic Methods and/in Digital Humanities.

On 23rd May, Leverhulme Visiting Professor Karen Pinkus from Cornell University will give the first in a series of Leverhulme Lectures, Thinking Decarbonisation with Literature, in which she will ask what narrative and language brought together can offer to a discussion of climate change mitigation.

On 7th June, Quentin Skinner Fellow Emma Hunter will give the annual Quentin Skinner Lecture and participate in the related symposium, Rethinking Liberties in Twentieth-Century Africa. The lecture and symposium will explore the history of liberalism, broadly defined, in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Africa, and consider how to move the study of the history of political thought beyond Western contexts.

Events arising from our Research Networks and Research Projects will also have designs on your diary-space.

In May, the International Black Radicalism Network will welcome Journey to Justice, a UK charity that galvanises people to act for social justice through learning about human rights movements and the arts.

CRASSH pushes forward its exploration of the challenges of Artificial Intelligence with the workshop on The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Language, Gender, Technology, mounted by our Centre for the Humanities and Social Change. It will consider the social impact of AICT, Artificially Intelligent Communications Technology (smart stuff that talks to you), focussing in particular on the complex relationships between language, gender and technology.

The conference Exuviae (skins, sheddings, cast-offs, from Latin exuere, to strip off) will use the work of Alfred Gell to explore historical ideas of the propagation and distribution of the self through images and objects.

Over two weeks in July the CRASSH project Religious Diversity and the Secular University will hold its 2019 Summer School. A group of junior scholars will work with three scholars-in-residence, along with project members, to analyse primary sources and engage critically with work-in-progress by each participant.

CRASSH is presenting 60 other events this term that I have no space to mention. And, to crown a copious year of exhibitions that have entranced and intrigued visitors to the Alison Richard Building, we are excited to announce the inaugural Cambridge Summer Open exhibition from 24 June to 2 August 2019. Artists are invited to submit their work to Art at the Alison Richard Building.

Collect your copy of the latest CRASSH What's On from the Alison Richard Building (Sidgwick Site) from 23 April – or page through the digital version above. For details of specific events, please visit our online events calendar – and don't forget to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.